58 réponses à ce sujet

[Natureguy85]

Damn. I had no idea Bioware employees were facing so much crap. It kind of makes me a little apologetic; I've been hard on them before, but not nearly to that level. 

 

Then you have nothing for which to apologize.

[alex13abc]

People unhappy about a broken pc product =/= people who made death threats years ago. You are a troll OP. 

[SadisticChunkyDwarf]

There's a big difference between what you do (provide a service) and what Bioware does (creates a product).

 

And generally, complaints are not listened to uness they have merit.

 

In your case "I fucked up and lost tons of money, you suck!" is not a valid complaint.

 

In this case, many of the complaints are valid "There are numerous bugs that make it difficult or impossible to actually play the game".

 

Those are the sorts of complaints any smart publisher should listen to. Because not everyone is as dumb as you seem to think. I have no intention of buying the next Bioware game on release, if ever, due to this experience (this is actually the first one I haven't waited for, so I'm not as big of a blindly loyal fanboy as you seem to imply). I'm sure other people agree as well.

 

Word of mouth is a big deal when you're dealing with a large consumer base, many of whom spend time on the internet. This is why pre-release game reviews are so important for companies. The review comes out, and primarily spreads through word of mouth (or keyboard).

 

"Hey, I heard this game was good, it got good reviews! Are you going to buy it?"

 

On the day of release and for maybe a week afterward, sales will be high. They should continue to sell copies steadily for a reasonable period if it lives up to the reviews over time.

 

However, if enough people are dissatisfied, and start expressing said dissatisfaction with valid complaints, things slow down. You may still have people going "I heard it was great!" but you'll have a solid core of people going "It has issues, I'd wait a bit". At that point it goes from a sure-fire purchase, to a doubtful one.  That's just how people work. They'll believe what they hear, and if they hear conflicting things, they will be more hesitant to act on the one that may cost them.

 

This is not high rollers making false claims in the hopes that you'll be intimidated and recoup their losses out of fear. This is simply people saying "I don't like this" to someone, and those people saying "I heard it wasn't very good" to other people. 

 

In the old days where this was primarily spread by verbal communication, this was a small difference. Now, with social media being ubiquitous, it is a bigger deal. Not the primary source of new consumers, by a long shot, but a potentially significant chunk.

 

And yes, I realize DA:I is not the only one in the series.

 

Do you realize that buying a product again is not in any way the same thing as buying the next iteration of said product?

 

I also never disputed that EA has "all the power" as far as my copy goes.

 

But that doesn't mean that valid complaints are unwarranted or useless, and it certainly doesn't mean I don't have a right to express them as I please. "This thing is bad" is not a determination determined solely, or even primarily by the company.

 

"This is/is not profitable" is. "We should do/should not do something about this" is.

 

"This isn't bad because we say so" is not.

 

It's not so different as you might think. I'm talking about largely online wagering. The company I work for has the policy "we don't pay out due to technical issues". Yeah, try telling that to people who spend that amount of money and have genuine issues with the website or apps.

 

My point largely was my company is so huge that they're beyond all that "the customer dictates to us" stuff, because we can afford to be. Same with EA/Bioware. They'll make games and they'll continue to sell, they've already survived far worse travesties than this, this is minor stuff. You'd be hard pressed to paint DA:I as anything but a success at this point, until some catastrophic sales numbers come out to say the direct opposite, it's a largely defenseless position. DA:I did in fact have great word of mouth going for it at launch and still now, not sure what you're trying to get at. PC issues? Ahhh well, there's a reason Rockstar doesn't directly develop for the PC at launch, they don't have to. And even if it was a financial failure, so what? Companies like this can afford to, and sometimes do, fail in that regard. The biggest companies take the most risks because those "risks" which would appear to be suicide to a smaller entity are easily covered by marketing and whatever their next venture is going to be.

 

You can claim that your position is your unhappy because of such and such issue, but ultimately you're pissing into the wind. You can't touch these guys. You can stop buying their games as I pointed out, but nothing else you can do about it. Even genuine complaints can and often do fall on deaf ears. That's just reality.

[Laerune]

People have the right to voice their opinion and frustration to the developers, when a product that they bought is not working correctly. A fine example would be the no music background in some zones

 

But.. this does not mean we should send death threats to the developers, doing that is not only childish, but makes you look like your not 100% up there.

 

Still, I hope Bioware tests its product much better next time, because the whole no music in the game bug is a pain and basicly forces me to either play without music or wait for weeks untill they fix this.

[SadisticChunkyDwarf]

I think you need to double check what "former" and "latter" mean, unless you are trying to say something very odd.

 

 

 

I apologize, I'm unable to find the statistics I was looking for, but I can tell you that every President and many public figures received death threats and yet very few are killed. The point is that while something always could happen, there is little reason to take too seriously the comments of some random moron on the internet who doesn't really know you or where you live.

 

I don't need to be specific because you made a general, blanket statement that something can't be a failure if it was done according to plan. Maybe you meant if it achieves a goal, in which case it would by definition not be a failure, though the poster using that term may have simply meant that it was low quality.

 

No, DA2 isn't not very good because it didn't appeal to me; it didn't appeal to me because it wasn't very good. The characters were not as deep and the central conflict was ruined by the ending.

 

Well speaking of statistics, there have been 44 US presidents, 16 of which faced assassination attempts, 4 of which were successful. So if every president is a recipient of a death threat, you're not proving your point that such threats are meaningless. That's a fairly high percentage.

 

I'll repeat, if you are not the person who received the death threat, or know or are the person who delivered the threat, you have absolutely no business talking about how serious the threat is, no matter what reasoning you use. Full stop.

 

Something absolutely can be a failure if it works according to plan. But again, you're not in a position to make such a statement either unless you're aware of what the plan actually was. Of course the object is to "achieve a goal", I see little other reason why one would devise a plan. Plans are not made just for the sake of themselves. Of low quality is subjective, and again goes back to that posters opinion, not on whether or not a person failed at their job.

[DukeMcFishy]

Ok first off, let me be clear, I don't know what is up with people sending threats at developers. It is wrong and despicable. Something must be wrong in the heads of people doing it. Second it is the internet. I myself had my fair share of "fan mail" when voicing my opinion about something on the internet. While I recognize it must be only a very tiny fraction of what developers get it comes with the territory sadly.

 

Now that that is out of the way. OP you understand that whole dev teams very rarely stay at a AAA company after the game is done. It is pretty normal, because when the game has launched you don't need those hundreds of people to create patches and/or DLC. The main body of work is done. It has nothing to do with angry people on the internet. It is just a simple fact of the industry and common business sense.

[Lebanese Dude]

It is easy to forget that developers are people with their own set of feelings too. Many do.

 

But don't worry OP. It's normal for there to be turnover between projects. Jennifer Helper's case was extreme.

[SilentWolfie]

To be completely candid, ME3's ending was a moment where I thought someone needed to be fired (the person responsible for the ending). I still do, because it was simply a moment where I felt I threw down $150 and hundreds of hours, only to be cheated of a closure and every effort wasted. That's my personal opinion. Someone wasted my time and money.

 

But over the Anders issue? That's clearly not a problem of game quality but something much more serious fundamentally.

 

Still, the same story stands. If you screwed up, you have to take responsibility. If the devs screwed up on the PC gameplay, people have the right to be angry. To a certain extent I personally think that Bioware has been doing poorly ever since EA partnered with them. The game cycle development has been ridiculously quick, 2-3 years of it isn't really sufficient to do AAA games which are ported to 5 different platforms.